Reduce Call Center Shrinkage with Contact Center Automation

Call center shrinkage may seem like a necessary evil by yesterday’s standards. However, technology that works in real-time – contact center workforce automation – has proven to dramatically reduce the cost of call center shrinkage.

Here’s how automation can benefit your center:

Training Made Easy

It’s important that your agents get the proper training and development. But scheduling, rescheduling and moving your agents off the floor for training drains time and money. Workforce management teams manually adjust schedules and rearrange training as volume fluctuates. As agents move back and forth for classroom training, that’s time that could be spent serving customers.

Contact center automation designed with robotic processes (RPA) sends training directly to agent desktops during idle time. And if volume picks up during those sessions, agents receive a real-time notification to return to the phones. It eliminates manual scheduling adjustments and the back and forth time spent attending classroom training. It ensures both workforce managers and agents are spending their time wisely.

Time for Coaching & Other Off-Phone Tasks

1:1 coaching should always be a priority, but fluctuating demand can push it to the wayside. As with training, it’s often canceled and rescheduled by the workforce management team using time consuming, manual processes. Using contact center automation, you can schedule coaching automatically during pockets of available time.

It’s not just the training and coaching process that you can streamline. Create a list of all activities that take agents off-phone and add to shrinkage costs. These off-phone activities can be completed during available time: employee surveys, quizzes, FCR tips, recognition awards and important reminders.

Keep Agents on Schedule

Ensuring agents stay on schedule can be difficult when customer interactions conflict with lunch and break times. Call center automation built on robotic processes (RPA) provides agents with an automated manager that prompts them on their break or lunch before a long call turns into an adherence issue.

Leading call centers have dramatically reduced the cost of shrinkage using contact center automation. In fact, a top insurer was able to move two hours/agent/month from shrinkage and save $500,000 a year. Workforce managers can work more efficiently, agents can work more productively, and you can experience greater cost savings for your business.

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